Accessibility and esotericism: the ethics of making the unreadable, readable

Author: Elena Trowsdale

Author’s ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9028-8663

Date uploaded: 9 May 2023

One of the most important lessons I have learnt on the MSc in Digital Scholarship is the importance of accessibility. I learnt how and why it could be achieved, and that it is worth striving to ensure all knowledge is accessible, that all information is freely available. This is the current sensibility amongst digital scholars: that all information should be accessible to all, regardless of country of origin, language barriers, technology access and learning differences. I believe in the radical truth of these statements; that time, money and effort should be put into making information into accessible formats and uploading it to accessible spaces.

However, I’ve begun to find myself questioning whether everything fits this schema.

Over the course of this year I have been working on various medieval and early modern magical and esoteric documents. I have been transcribing, translating and uploading these documents, aiming to make their contents freely available online. During this process, there have been a number of moments when I have stopped myself, retreated from my laptop and questioned – should I really be doing this? Do these documents require accessibility?

I believe this to be an important ethical question. Some documents come with an inherent attribute of secrecy, an aura of the mystical that may require different treatment than simply being transcribed and uploaded to a generic site.

Or maybe I am affording these texts too much sentimentality? Maybe I am allowing their attention-grabbing mysticism to hold too much power over me and my purpose as a digital scholar? To investigate this, it is worth turning to the physical examples.

Firstly, this is an image taken from MS. Rawl. D. 252, a Medieval grimoire likely used by monks or priests to exorcise demons from unlucky patients. Images from this text are already freely available on ‘Digital Bodleian’. 

This image contains a pentagram. This was likely used as a reference for the drawing the priest would have to make as part of their exorcism incantation. I envisage that the words within and  surrounding this pentagram would be recited, carrying the magical power of exorcism. Whether spiritual or superstitious or neither, I imagine it would still take some severe convincing for the   average joe to speak these words aloud— so why should I feel comfortable typing them?

My specific work on this document involved annotating it with scholarly information on the IIIF enabled ‘mirador’ software. This involved drawing boxes around each individual section I wanted to annotate, resulting in the online document appearing like this:

This is both a useful tool and feels like a strange imposition upon the text. Useful because it means each aspect of imagery and text can be individually understood, and, an imposition because it slices apart the text as a whole, dividing it and imposing colours and lines upon each section. The purple box contained my translation, an anglicisation of the original mix of Hebrew, Latin and Greek.

Every step of this process felt like a debasement. It felt so hard to stay true to the original intention of the text. Though I understood that my annotations were operating as an ethically important scholarly exercise, making historical information, translation and transcription of this text easily accessible in one, user-friendly location, I still questioned my actions. To me, this magical text transcended its associated information, it should have been treated as more than a problem that could be solved or a puzzle that could be decoded. Its metadata was implicit in its contents, yet shrouded by the mix of languages and nonsense words, appropriate only for its use case.

Turning to another example, Anne Bathurst’s Rhapsodical Diary (MS. Rawl. D. 1338), an Early Modern visionary journal, a tension exists between its uncertain use case and personal tone. As a diary, you would expect it to be a wholly private document. However, historical and textual evidence suggests this diary was widely read and circulated in manuscript form by the religious sect its author belonged to—the ‘Philadelphian Society’. For this reason, it feels slightly more ethically appropriate to study. However, there is still a noticeable element of voyeurism involved in reading her writings.

Reading sentences such as ‘I see myself as the night before at the door’ and ‘being much taken up about what had been revealed to me’ feel eerily intimate, as if you are experiencing her visions with her as you read. Oddly, this may be intentional. Its possible this intimate style may be a tactical theological reason to impress her message on the reader. Again, because of its more reader-intended use case, this feels more appropriate to type out, to make into an online, accessible format.

Hence, these examples both point towards coming up with a new, document-specific workflow in order to decide whether religiously/culturally sensitive documents should be digitised or made accessible, and what processes should be used. Sensitive and adaptable processes should be implemented when texts create an innate sense of unease. This feeling should be respected in the digital humanities as an indication of human appropriateness. A user-interface should not be an inhuman machine, it should appeal to the sentiment of human users when they access documents. It should contain the necessary information to feel the document has been treated appropriately.

Ultimately, accessibility cannot be a blanket rule. Perhaps, it can only be a blanket aspiration.